The Policy Lass

Couldn’t resist this. Of course, based on the content of the study, we can presume this will be denied as well.

From RawStory.com:

Belief in Free Market Economics Predicts Denial of Science 

A strong belief in a hands off approach to economics is tightly linked to the rejection of scientific facts such as climate change, according to research published in Psychological Science in late March.

“The conspiracist ideation that all of the world’s scientific academies have conspired together to create a hoax known as global warming has found traction in American mainstream politics,” Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australia and his colleagues wrote in their study.

In particular, Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has alleged that thousands of scientists working independently over decades are actually part of “the greatest hoax” to increase regulation on businesses and individuals.

The study of 1,377 people who visited climate change denial blogs found endorsement oflaissez-faire free markets predicted the rejection of climate science and other established scientific facts, such as that HIV causes AIDS or that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer.

“The pivotal role of personal ideology in the rejection of climate science has been repeatedly demonstrated,” Lewandowsky and his colleagues explained. “We highlighted the magnitude of this effect among climate-science blog denizens, who have a strong interest in the issue, and we additionally showed that endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of two other well-established scientific facts.”

 

Of course, this merely confirms what most of us already knew: the reality of climate change due to human influences, such as greenhouse gasses and land use is not under debate. What is under debate is what to do about it. In order to argue we should do nothing, to keep faith with their ideological commitment to free market economics, denialsts must deny the science. Any way they can.Wildly ridiculous claims of hoax and conspiracy — it doesn’t matter. These folks don’t really care about facts or evidence. Just maintaining their ideological purity — or power.

Daniel Sarewitz has a commentary in Nature in which he claims that science is on a “worrying slide towards politicization”. The solution so that scientists can “gain the confidence of people and politicians across the political spectrum”? Scientists can demonstrate that “science is bipartisan.”

No. Just no.

Science is not bi-partisan. Science should not be bi-partisan. It should be non-partisan.

FULL STOP.

If “science has come, over the past decade or so, to be a part of the identity of one political party, the Democrats, in the United States” it is not because science is partisan. It is because one political party, namely the Republican Party, has ever so steadily estranged itself from science, through cutting funding or outright denial of science’s findings.

The problem isn’t with science’s partisanship. It’s with the corruption of politics and the radicalization of the Republican Party. The political realm is so thoroughly addicted to the financial elite’s donations and influence that the science has been denied, ignored and trodden on. The Republican Party has so thoroughly estranged itself from anything resembling moderation that it is a shadow of its former self.

Politics, that behemoth, is the real problem.

The Behemoth and Leviathan

There can be no better example than climate change / global warming.

Read more…

I love mathematics. It’s so simple. 1 + 1 = 2.

When the Gleick Heartland documents were first released, people who call themselves climate skeptics claimed that the strategy memo was a fake because Heartland wouldn’t be so blatant in its wording about its goals and strategy to undermine the IPCC and prevent teachers from teaching science:

Lines such as the following were given as examples:

“Heartland is part of a growing network of groups working the climate issues, some of which we support financially. We will seek additional partnerships in 2012. At present we sponsor the NIPCC to undermine the official United Nation’s IPCC reports and paid a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered.” 

And:

“Principals and teachers are highly biased towards the alarmist perspective. To counter this, we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for hte K-12 classroom… His [Dr. Wojick's] efforts will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain — two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.”

People on the “skeptic” side argued that the document must be fake because there is no way any right-minded CEO would write a climate strategy that bald-faced about its efforts to deny science and undermine the IPCC.

Then we have this:

Any organization that would put up a billboard that is as extreme as this is very very capable of writing a confidential document that contains the quotes above.

Simple maths.

Research shows that stupid people — people who truly are ignorant — tend to think they know far more than they do. They are also more likely to think informed people know less than they do. It’s the D-K effect and it’s rampant at both CA and WUWT and Climate Etc. If you’ve ever haunted those sites, you know what I’m talking about.

I’m always tempted to go to there and look for ‘teh stupid’ so I can mock it, but as the Twain quote says, they just bring you down to their level. Admittedly, there is a certain pleasure in mocking teh stupid, but life is short and its unnaturally warm outside. Time’s a wasting.

Instead of arguing with stupid people, I’ll instead try to point out really smart people and focus on what they say and do, in order to try to figure out what we should do.

So that’s the new me — not so much mock and snark (although I can’t promise that some won’t slip in now and then — it is my basic nature, after all) and more analysis.

I have several climate-related books on my bookshelf, including Michael Mann’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, The Honest Broker, by Pielke Jr., Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen, Challenged by Carbon by Bryan Lovell and Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer.

I hope to read and provide a review for each of them in the coming weeks.